71–80 of 116 posts
A good example: Taking your FCC ham license exam does not permit use of your phone or a programmable calculator. They would have allowed me to use it.
I had practiced for the exams with my old HP 11C. It was jarring to have to switch to a TI calculator during the test.
There was a time when I would have salivated over this. But now I can run iPython on my phone, and have numpy, sympi, scipy, astropy and countless other packages. Physical keyboards are great for calculators - much better than virtual keyboards on phones. But the keyboard advantage seems to me most valuable for quick calculations, not elaborate things like this calculator offers. If I'm going to do matrix calculation…
There was a time when I would have salivated over this. But now I can run iPython on my phone, and have numpy, sympi, scipy, astropy and countless other packages. Physical keyboards are great for calculators - much better than virtual keyboards on phones. But the keyboard advantage seems to me most valuable for quick calculations, not elaborate things like this calculator offers. If I'm going to do matrix calculation…
There are just some user interface advantages for me in having a physical calculator. The only thing stopping me from buying this is the price tag.
Am I the only one who dislikes the CR2032 that all the RPN calculators need?
No, although my old one (HP42S) used 3 of the smaller stubbier batteries.
I still miss my 15C.
There's a really good emulator for the iPhone! Back when I bought it, it came from HP themselves, but a few years ago they sold it to another company which actually maintains it. They just released a major new version a few weeks ago.
Super cool! But I so rarely reach for the physical calculators I already have these days. Any recommendations on RPN calculators for Windows or Android? The one I've got on my phone right now has some little quirks that bug me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What IDE do you use? this functionality sounds great.
I use Android phones, and there are at least two ways to get iPython going on an Android phone. The first is Termux, which provides a gnu userspace atop the Android kernel. This app is pretty old, and well-tested. There is an active and helpful Termux community. But it has some downsides: 1) The version of Termux in the Google Play Store is not the preferred and maintained version, although the Play Store version doe…
This sort of reminds me of the Numworks, except this feels a bit more artisan (and expensive). In high school, my friends got onto the Numworks bandwagon, and we even used them on the SATs and AP tests (they were explicitly allowed). To be fair, this is before Numworks locked down their calculators and the alternative firmwares (Omega) died off, but maybe there are jailbreaks now and things are as they were before.
> except this feels a bit more artisan The difference (as far as I know) is that Numworks (and Casio, etc.) are mainly used by students, while SwissMicros (and HP) are used for very quick problem-solving on the job.
There was a time when RPN was waaay better than the TI and other competition, but in my mind that time is now past us. I can use both designs well and will take a TI-89 over a Swiss Micros (mind you I own several) almost any day as it is more straightforward. That's my opinion anyway. This improvement over the DM42 is pretty cool though.
Another Swiss Micros use is for people who work in a lab with gloves and can use a calculator better than a phone.
Is this the DM42n hardware with the R47 firmware preloaded? It looks identical, except for the colors of some of the keys, and I wouldn't think they'd have a separate hardware pipeline for it. I could be wrong, though! If someone were to obsess over their gear and tweak it until it was just so, this would be the company to do it.